Letters To The Editor

January 11, 1989

MAKE A MOVE

While I applaud your Dec. 30 feature, "Families are changing their throwaway ways," for raising community awareness, it lacked one saldient point regarding recycling on the Peninsula: It is terribly inconvenient.

I lived most of my life in Seattle, where recycling bins for aluminum, paper and glass can be found in virtually every grocery store parking lot. The bins are placed and managed by charities or recycling companies and make recycling accessible to all, while costing local government nothing. By comparison, in Denbigh, I must go to downtown Newport News or Hampton just to recycle newspapers. The bins are unmanned and the managers do not pay for recyclable materials. I, and I suspect others, don't care if we are paid for recycling or not, which may explain the modest success of the Seattle program.

One of the greatest ironies of this issue is that city leaders have debated it for the one-and-a-half years I've lived here in connection with the local garbage crisis. They portray recycling as a revolutionary solution but have yet to take the simplest steps to implement any recycling program. Wake up. Recycling is far from progressive.

Frederick J. Sommer

Newport News

FACE FACTS

There seems to be a pervasive misconception abroad nowadays pertaining to the origins of African slavery in this country. I saw this misconception in a Dec. 26 letter by John S. Dorst. I quote from the letter: "What is truly ironic is that after the white people came from England so they could have civil and religious rights in America they traveled all the way to Africa, where they kidnapped thousands of native Africans and made them slaves."

Facts are troublesome things and the fact is that if any white people kidnapped any native Africans it was the exception, not the rule. The facts are that the blacks of rival tribes kidnapped each other and sold each other into slavery. And when the Europeans did arrive (first the Portugese, then the Dutch, then the French and the British, and lastly the Americans from New England), the native kings allowed them to have trading stations on the beaches, but the white man was not allowed inland. The black man preferred to keep the lucrative slave-catching grounds of the interior to himself.

Facts are troublesome things, and we, like Adam, are prone to the shifting of guilt to others. If there are any who would absolve the guilt the black men who sold other black men into slavery on the grounds that they were led into temptation by the markets which prevailed at the time, then the drug dealers of today must be absolved from guilt on the same grounds.

H. V. Traywick Jr.

Deltaville

KIND DRIVERS

I travel from Gloucester to Newport News once a week, occasionally more often. I am impressed with the thoughtfulness of the drivers who use I-64. Almost always they move into the left lane to allow drivers to merge on the highway.

The speed does not appear to be excessive on I-64 generally.

Kindness and thoughtfulness make driving more pleasant, less stressful. We can use more of this kind of behavior.

Virginia Lee B. Glover

Gloucester Point

CHANGE SYSTEM

Once again, the people are affronted by the threat of another unethical and unearned increase in pay by our political representatives. The time was in our society when a raise in pay was awarded to an individual for outstanding performance and dedication to his responsibilities.

In the beginning of 1981, President Reagan made some derogatory remarks concerning his inheritance of a $79 billion deficit and a national debt of $1 trillion. Now, at the end of 1988, he and Congress have succeeded in compiling a budget deficit somewhere around $150 billion and a national debt of $2.6 trillion. It has become obvious that our current members of Congress have been around too long. It's like that old saying about guests and fish; when they have been around too long, they begin to smell. Every once in a while, it becomes necessary to air out the place. Unfortunately, congressmen can't be fired for incompetence. Congress is reluctant even to reprimand a member. A different method of political representation needs to be conceived in order to re-establish the original concept "of the people, by the people and for the people."

James G. Lane

Gloucester Point

SAFER, TOO?

President Reagan, Congress and George Bush are all promising to continue cutting the budget deficit, but I don't see how they can do it. Seems like everytime I pick up the newspaper they need another $100 million for something. Now they say it'll cost more than a hundred billion to rebuild our aging nuclear weapon building facilties.

This latest crisis has me confused, though. I thought everyone agreed that we and the Russians both have at least 10 times as many bombs as we possibly could use. Didn't the president propose his START plan to cut both strategic stockpiles in half as a start toward a more sensible military posture? Of course, SDI does present a serious roadblock to START, but just about all the experts agree that Star Wars makes no sense; and now even our politicians seem to realize that this juicy plum is too big for our budget to swallow.

Everyone agrees that a START treaty would make the world safer. If dropping Star Wars and negotiating the START treaty would also save us hundreds of billions of dollars, wouldn't that further strengthen our nation? Wouldn't it be great if we could have a safer world and a balanced budget, too.